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heart is still intact, if that’s what you’re worried about. (His heart is the problem.) Our man bleeds blackly, redly, deadly. Our man was gone in a few great gushes. I’m a collector and I came to.
    It’s me. You can be you. I’ve been honest and I’m being honest now. Blood is just as thick as we’ve heard. Blood doesn’t cool if you admit relief. That rustcolored pump will throb on and on.
    Somebody tarred Daddy to the floor.
    I can’t deny it’s gorgeous that a brain sees what its experience has trained it to see. If you’ve never known love it’s clear you’d mistake it for something else. Loneliness perhaps. Greed.
    How about: blood congeals and forms a skin. Or: our man’s dying breath lasted fifteen seconds. This: we both love(d) you more than life itself.
    THE DETECTIVE:
    The detective set out. Squeezed the last bits of whiskey from the Ziploc he kept in his breast pocket. The road unfurled in the white wash from his headlights. He had her underwear in his fist, damp with blood, and when he held them to his mouth he smelled iron, or something that should be called iron. Perhaps it really was a man’s blood.
    When they found her, two severed ears were gripped in her bloodslick hands. She declined the offer to hand them over. She was naked except for the underwear. A lady cop was called in to cuff her.
    The detective held his breath driving past the cemetery, pushing the panties into his mouth just short of gagging.
    THE WIFE:
    I was born with an extra spine in a lump on my shoulder. My parents had it removed but I can still feel it. Like a ghost limb. Like a ghost twin. She grew up and lived and she weighs me down and we share everything. My parents called her Imaginary Friend. Sometimes it’s just too hard to relate to the real thing. None of this is true, of course. It’s just the easiest way to explain.
    Of course none of this is true. I’ll try another way. There was a girl that died mysteriously down the street when I was growing up. After her funeral I saw her white face in her bedroom window, watching me, mouthing, Wait for me, wait for me, and I waited and I’m still waiting. Every once in a while I hear her name being called, but there’s never an answer.
    No. No. No. No.
    Here: her room was across the hall. At night I stood outside her door and listened for her breathing but I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of silence. I watched her chest not move. She was dead and then the morning would come and she was alive. There was no way she could die. There was no way she could be revived. We wrote notes to each other and slid them under our doors. Mine said, I wish I was alone. Hers said, I miss you.
    THE SISTER:
    Oh, and the way he’d kiss me. Like I was you. Like I was the you he always dreamed I was. If you are discourteous with a rose its petals will bruise. That’s how he kissed me, so gorgeously discourteously. I could feel my heart beating in my lips. I could feel the throb of blood.
    THE DETECTIVE:
    The detective stopped at a do-it-yourself car wash. Got out and leaned against the car, did a few toots of Afrin. The lights hummed and a hot moist wind came in and made his neck sweat. He’d punched in three hours and forty-seven minutes ago. He had four hours and thirteen minutes to go. He had to be looking for something.
    Pretty soon he heard the squeaking, like a mouse caught in a trap. The lights blinded him and all he saw was a vivid darkness. He listened to her getting closer.
    Then she was there, squinting up at him from the edge between light and dark. A child’s head, the cherubic face, the purple empty gums, the wisps of hair. The body of a trucker, its puffed, sexless chest, its clumpy limbs. The wheelchair and the mangled hands forcing its wheels along. The drool bright on her chin. The smell of urine and cinnamon chewing gum. The MacGuffin.
    She motioned to the Afrin and he gave it to her. He was glad for the other one he had in the glove compartment.
    Pretty soon he